I have attained an all new low at my job. I have posted in the past that I am a surgical tech working 3rd shift to cover emergency call while I'm in school during the day. Well, the other night I had to help remove a 14 inch long 3.5 inch thick cucumber out of some guys ass. His excuse for placing it there? He was horny. Hepatitis C and MRSA, too. I should get hazardous duty pay.

Life has gotten harder. I am going back to college to get my second of possibly 3 degrees. I am currently a surgical tech, now I am working on being a radiological tech with the hopes of being a nuclear medicine tech. That's a lot of techs. But if it works out in less than 4 years I'll be making about double what I make now. I'm still hoping for the powerball. If I do, I'll buy Chris Todd that new Accord he wants. Maybe 2.

So yesterday as my father and I rolled up to the field to do some much needed flying I totally had it my mind that today would be different from all the other times that I fly. Normally I just show up, plug in a battery and fly until it's almost dead. Switch batteries and repeat.

Actually, it's not a bad plan. Yesterday, however, was to be different. I was going to actually work on learning new skills. I want to work on the timing to allow me to do harrier rolls and other such rolling maneuvers without losing altitude. Sounded great in my head. 5 batteries later and I have yet to attempt a single one. The South Carolina heat was kicking in and it was time to go.

I think I learned a valuable lesson though. All I need is some stick time to be happy. I don't actually require any true skills. I did manage to drag the tail on the ground while doing some harriers, and I had some decent blenders. I'm just looking forward to to my next chance to not try to learn anything.

the next three days might be pretty awesome. i'm leaving shortly to drop my wife off at the airport so she can go on a business trip to vegas. so for the next three days i am home alone, so i'll get to fly and eat bad food and whatever i want. which probably means i might fly once or twice and still eat my veggies. no strippers or raging parties. damn, i'm boring.

so, back in december i had tonsils removed in an attempt to sure my sleep apnea. for about a month and a half i had some of the best sleep of my life. then it started going back to the way it was before the surgery. i went to see my surgeon and he suggested a follow-up sleep study to see if there is some other problem that might be causing me to experience apnea again. i did the sleep study about 2 weeks ago and last week i got my results. i had no signs of apnea, but.....they seem to think i might have narcolepsy. how awesome is that? something with no real cure, a lifetime of being tired and not being able to do anything about it. there are medications, stimulants for example. but who wants to experience the constant highs and lows and the possible addiction. anti-depressants are also recommended, bye-bye sex life. the last one is a drug called xyrem, aka GHB, aka the date rape drug. same exact formulation. apparently you can only get directly from the maker, jazz pharma, and it's unlikely that insurance will pay the $1000 a month it costs. but i guess i would make a great date. who knows, maybe i don't actually have it. i still have yo get further testing done.

i love my precision aerobatics addiction. it is by far one of the absolute best planes i have ever flown. it will do whatever i want it to or at least whatever i can make it do, and then slow down nicely and settle onto the ground right in front of me. i have slammed into the ground on more than one occasion now and other than a cracked wheel pant there is no damage. and, unlike all of the large scale airplanes out there, it fits nicely into the trunk of my honda civic. sorta. i have to put the seats down to fit the rudder.

i am fat. out of shape. it sucks. i recently bought a bicycle, a specialized allez triple. it's a nice bike, it's fast. i manged 31mph today, downhill of course. but it is kicking my ass. i have cut my meat eating down to almost virtually zero. practically vegetarian. i don't mind that too much. my wife keeps finding great recipes and i enjoy vegetables. it's also not the bike riding that i hate. i used to ride all the time. about 10 years ago i used to ride a skateboard, a mountainbike, and a roadbike daily. not all at once. usually at least two of them. road at lunch, mountain in the afternoon, and then skating at night. that was 10 years and 60 pounds ago. now i am trying to start biking again. i don't dare try to restart skating due to the fact that i am still recovering from many of those injuries. the main problem is that i think i expect to step on my bike and still be as fast and have the ability to ride 40 miles and i can't. it's a little frustrating having to admit my condition to myself. i see it every time i look in the mirror. but i guess i'm still in denial. but the longer i protect my heart the longer i can fly my airplanes. that's my philosophy, i hope it works.

OK, I scrapped the first one. everything was glued crooked and it looked like hell. This time it looks a hell of a lot better and I masked off a design on the wings before painting it. Pretty soon I'll be hovering a mere few dozen feet above the ground.

so apparently later this year the aptera will be released in california. if you don't don't know the aptera is a new car (sorta) that will be releases as two different models, the type 1e and the type 1he (i think). the 1e is electric that runs on lipo's and gets about 120 miles to a charge, and the 1he is a gas-electric hybrid that gets on average 300 mpg. they accomplish this through aerodynamics. studies have shown that the average car uses 70% of it's energy just moving air out of the way. well the aptera, looking more like an airplane, solves that problem through streamling and a few other neat tricks such as only having three wheels. due to it's weight and the three wheel configuration it's classified as a motorcycle, but because it has three wheels and it's totally enclosed you aren't required to get a motorcycle license or wear a helmet. and it has indy car style safety features, but as of right now it will only do about 85-90mph instead of 200. check it out at www.aptera.com. and it's a lot cheaper then the tesla roadster, although not as fast.

i see so many people who build these amazing 1/4 scale and larger planes from scratch, and here i am trying to tweek some homebuilt 3d foamies. lame. but they're fun as hell. my first one, extra 300, was fun and flew well, but it was too nose heavy and hit the ground wrong upon landing and removed the motor mount. i'm going to build a new one. stronger....faster....less nose heavy. it's fun to fly something that you built from nothing, even if it's as simple as a little foamie. but i still give preference to my PA addiction. best plane ever. let me throw in some props for rcfoam.com. i ordered my foam and carbon strips on a friday afternoon around 3pm and then at 9:30am saturday it was on my porch. and they threw in a sheet 6mm depron for free to go with my 3mm sheets. i think in the next few weeks i am going to download the directions for dave powers' 6mm depron f-117 and start building it. it looks like a fun plane.

i just got home from 2 days at nall. luckily i only live an hour away. all i have is two words.....A_MA_ZING!!!!! sorry about the clerks reference. bill hempel is a madman, the 50% cub of his is ridiculous and if i had $2500 laying around not paying bills i would totally order one. the crowd was much larger than last year. if you couldn't make you should start planning for next years now.

last thursday night, we startes out with a spleenectomy due to trauma from a car wreck. we followed that up with an esophogectomy where you remove the esophogus and pull the stomach up through the chest and attach it to the remaining stump of the old esophogus depending on much you have to remove. this poor guy tore his trying to swallow steak. you never hear of that happening with tofu, suckas.

here we go again. now i have to go get ready and do a peri-rectal abcess on some poor lady. i might let eddie do it, since this will be the closest thing he's had to a date in a loooong time.

i hate living on a budget. with me going back to school it's hard to find the money to buy new planes. it sucks. anyone wanna buy a slightly abused fliton inspire 60? cheap. make an offer and come to my house and get it.

so you go into surgery to have an aortic anuerism repaired, and let me tell you that bites the big one. then less than 12 hours later you have to go in have that redone becuase it is leaking. then less than 24 hours from the original surgery you have to go in and have your entire colon removed because somewhere during the previous two surgeries the blood flow to it was compromised and now you have a bag on you belly collecting your poop. then less than two weeks later you are in renal failure, you have MRSA (methycillin resistant staph aureus, very bad), and you have blisters and sores all over your body from it and you backside is rotting away from that combined with laying on your back that whole time. oh yeah, and you have to have a trach tube placed to breath for you and your left leg amputated above the knee because it's already rotting away. and these are actually very good surgeons taking care of this poor person. sometimes you just can't win. oh yeah, and my PA addiction is destroyed and i have to order a new one. i love that little plane.

why is it that doctors wait until the cafeteria opens to post cases? i'm hungry and now i have to go remove someones appendix. what's up with that?

las night i got lucky at work. we were just starting a craniotomy for a patient who fell in his driveway and struck his head and needed to have the blood evacuated from around his brain and have the bleeding stopped when we got a call the we might also have to revise a ruptured aortic anuerism from earlier in the day that had already been revised once. re-revision? isn't that undoing what you've done? or is that un-revision? hell, i'm too tired to care. anyways, forunately the aorta patient stabilized. hope they're doing well. the crani patient did well, fortunately.

i got in a precision aerobatics addiction last week, awesome plane. i might try to fly it at the nall this year since i think i heard it mentioned that there'll be a parkflyers field for people with 2.4 ghz radios. i might be in too much awe of all the amazing planes from the people who are lucky enough to have the time and money(and some sponsors) to invest in this hobby. anyways, i'm having some problems with the cg. i have a 1800mah battery as suggested by PA and i have everything about as forward as it will go but it is still a tad tail heavy and since i am by no means an expert at 3d (yet) i don't care to go out and crash it. i just don't want to add any more weight to it to get it right. and the wires from my elevator and rudder servos aren't long enough to reach the receiver if i move it farther forward. i could add extensions, but that would be a little more weight and the possibility of something else to go wrong if those wires seperate which has happened to me before. i'll play around, maybe if ordered their carbon spinner that would add enough weight to the front, plus look sweet as hell.

so i have been a surgical tech for 6 years now, and have been working 3rd shift for almost two years just doing emergency cases. after all this time i finally got my opportunity to ram my finger into someones aorta that was ruptured in order to prevent them from bleeding to death while the surgeon did his work trying to control the bleeding. to be honest though, it's not as fun as you might think. with all the plaque and calcifications this poor lady has at 81 years old it felt sorta like jabbing my finger into the prop of f-22 parkjet. good news though, i heard that the day after surgery she was actually doing very well and my finger, too, has recovered. over the years my focus has been primarily on orthopaedics and some neuro. so hip fractures on the jackson trauma table are a breeze. vascular surgery is something i have had minimal experience in. so it was very educational. oh, and thanks to a nice sizeable refund from uncle sam this year and my wife recognizing all the hard work i have done in the yard for her i just ordered the addiction from precision aerobatics (atlantahobby actually). next week should be a fun week.

the last two weeks have been hell. i am 35 years old and i just had my tonsils out. if it weren't for percocet i couldn't have managed to survive at all. my wife assures me that it was totally worth my suffering now that she no longer requires ear plugs to sleep in the same room with me, and that i don't stop breathing every few minutes like i did before. so that's good. hooray for health. tomorrow is supposed to be my first day out flying in several weeks. i have my new (since i crashed my last one into a telephone pole) yardbird rc f-22, 3 batteries, a new futaba 6ex radio, and a devil may care attitude. i run with scissors. wish me luck.